Citadel of the Blogs The Inbox of the Internet (really)

A simple but effective way to monitor the Internet is “Google Alerts”. Google Alerts will automatically track news up to 30 days old, blogs, the web, videos tagged with your keywords, and “comprehensive” (a combination of news, web and blogs). Once you have entered your keywords and created your alert, Google Alerts will you send you an email whenever a new page has that keyword.

This is a handy way to stay on top of a field, research a particular subject, find more sources for your thesis, find bloggers writing about your topic (so you can post comments at their blogs or pitch them for publicity), find journalists who cover your area of expertise (so you can research them further by name), get the latest on a celebrity or sports team, or watch for new videos that match a specific topic.

To get the best results, be sure to use synonyms and phrases in quotes separated by the Boolean OR term. If you want to monitor news pages, you can even specify a location (e.g. location:Canada) or a source (e.g. source:globe_and_mail).

Google Alerts can also let you know whenever a new website links to your blog (e.g. link:myblogname.com); but on the other hand, you might find it useful to suppress results from your own website with the “site” operator (e.g. “the search term” –site:mysite.com).

If you would like to be notified when a particular webpage is modified (as opposed to containing your search terms), you can use “Change Detection”. This can be useful to alert you to those pages that are updated semi-regularly (e.g. once a month).

Both Google Alerts and Change Detection are free services and both will help you keep abreast of your particular areas of research interest.

One of the traps of keyword searches is the apparent ease with which you get results. The truth is, computers only retrieve what you type in so better results often depend on variations due to synonyms, spelling, common usage versus technical terms, and even singular versus plural terms.

In other words, the key to searching the Internet, databases and even an index at the back of a book is the same: words. The better you are with words, the better you will be at finding the information you want. And in fact, computer databases are not good sources for vague inquiries, so it pays to make your search as precise as possible.

The best way to begin a search, therefore, is by asking whether you know enough about the topic to find accurate search terms. If not, do some background research on a few words and phrases with a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopedia until you understand enough to go further. You might be surprised by the quality search results a few choice synonyms can yield. And this just means knowing some alternate ways to describe what you are looking for. Databases will often have a help or glossary screen you can use. And be sure to use the thesaurus if it has one. This will save you thinking of alternative keywords and will make your search both more comprehensive and more accurate.

For help searching, visit the University of Guelph library. For archived research tips, visit info tips.

Previously, I suggested using Google’s “cached” links to locate search terms quickly due to automatic highlighting. But what if your search leads to the dreaded “404 not found” message? For most surfers, once a page disappears from Google’s cache it no longer exists.

Fortunately, the Internet Archives’ “Wayback Machine” has been archiving the web since 1996. If the website you’re trying to find is more than six months old and has been linked to, chances are you can find it using the Wayback Machine.

When you find a page that no longer exists, copy and paste the old URL into the Wayback Machine. If it is there, you will be presented with a list of dates showing when it was archived. Simply click on one of the dates to view the archived page. An asterisk after some dates indicates that the page’s content had changed. This gives you an advantage for citing webages by date over Google/Yahoo’s cache which lack this feature.

The Internet Archives also offers you a book marklet to place in your browser’s toolbar. When surfing any page, simply click on the book marklet and it will load in the Wayback Machine. Alternatively, Yahoo cached links (but not Google) give you the option to check the link via the Wayback Machine from the header at the top of the page.

Researchers may find the Internet Archives useful to study the social or historical growth of the web since 1996 (e.g. CNN coverage of the Iraq war from the start until today); to view evolving website designs (e.g. to check out the competition’s changes over time); and for tracking down resources from an outdated bibliography.

Highlighting keywords lets you scroll to visible clusters of terms rather than jumping to one word via your browser’s “Find” function. This can reduce the time it takes to determine whether the page is relevant to your search.

To highlight using a page of Google results, click on the “cached” link. Because Google caches (stores) the webpages it examines, the cached links frequently load faster and may be available if the original pages go down. You can sometimes even access the cached version from a site that otherwise requires registration or subscription! The down side is that cached pages can destroy formatting, prevents scripts from working and present (slightly) outdated content. So just remember that, when you’ve found a page that’s relevant, follow the top link for the most up-to-date content.

You can also highlight words on any page already loaded in your browser with Google Toolbar (for Internet Explorer) or Googlebar (for most other browsers). Once installed, click the Google button, choose ‘Toolbar Options’, scroll to ‘Finding words within a page’, and fill the check boxes next to the ‘Highlight’ and ‘Word Find’ buttons. Now you can click the ‘Highlight’ button on your browser’s toolbar to toggle colored highlighting of your search terms.

For Macintosh users, try the public beta of Safari 3.0 or wait for the release of Leopard to benefit from its advanced highlighting options: the new live search feature will dim the page (!) while highlighting every match of the search term.

One way to shorten search time on the web is by limiting your search to a specific domain. Let’s say you want to search pages only from Canada. What do you do? You could go to Google’s homepage and click the appropriate radiobutton. You could use Google’s “Advanced Search”. Or you could do it directly in your search using Google’s site operator. Simple type “site:.ca”—without the quotes but with the colon—followed by your keywords. Voila! Google points you to only those pages with .ca in their domain.

This is a good way to search across classifieds (e.g. guelph.kijiji.ca, toronto.craigslist.org); American educational institutions (.edu); government websites (e.g. gov.on.ca); or combined with the quote operator you can get pretty specific results in a newspaper site, for example, “axis of evil” site:www.nytimes.com. In fact, you may prefer using a Google site search to a website’s own search box based on the results you get. But I’d recommend comparing both searches rather than always relying on one or the other. Sometimes I like, for example, Statistics Canada’s search box; and sometimes I like searching globally across the statcan.ca domain using the site operator.

Remember, when Google doesn’t work, most people don’t have a Plan B. Librarians have lots of Plan B’s. They know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google. Visit www.lib.uoguelph.ca/help/ask.htm for more information.